Pressure: Fascinating, behind-the-scenes D-Day saga

Pressure (2026) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five); rated PG-13, for war violence, bloody images and brief profanity

Available via: Peacock (free to subscribers) and other paid VOD options

By Derrick Bang

Director Anthony Maras’ fact-based drama opens on a grim scene that evokes 1998’s Saving Private Ryan.

 

It’s late April 1944. An ashen-faced Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) slowly walks along Slapton Sands beach in Devon, horrified by the multitude of dead and wounded soldiers, some floating in the waves lapping at the shore. It’s the ghastly wake of Exercise Tiger, a two-day D-Day rehearsal which, because of miscommunication, resulted in the deaths of at least 750 American servicemen, hundreds due to friendly fire.

 

Meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott, right) isn't surprised when his forecast for
the impending D-Day invasion — advising against mounting the offensive on the
chosen day — angers Gen. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), but he quietly refuses
to change his mind.

That catastrophe remained largely unknown until the 1988 publication of historian Charles B. MacDonald’s Slapton Sands: The “Cover Up” That Never Was.

The prologue amplifies Eisenhower’s determination to make no mistakes on D-Day.

 

It’s also the first of two “I never knew that” revelations within this film, adapted by Maras and playwright David Haig from the latter’s 2012 play of the same title.

 

We cut to June 2, inside the London home of eminent Scottish meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott) and his very pregnant wife, Liz (Tamsin Topolski). Just as they finish breakfast, Stagg is collected by a military escort, having been appointed Chief Meteorological Officer for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, commanded by Eisenhower.

 

(In November 1943, Stagg was granted an emergency commission with the rank of group captain in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, giving him an essential level of authority in a military milieu unaccustomed to outsiders ... a detail that this film’s script should have supplied.)

 

Stagg arrives at the heavily guarded Southwick House, and is thrown amidst a group of several dozen researchers and meteorologists under the command of American Col. Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina), who accurately supplied weather conditions for Eisenhower’s earlier African and Middle-Eastern campaigns. Krick and this new team have been tasked with selecting the optimal conditions for the Normandy landing: a specific overlap of weather, the tides, the time of day, and the phase of the moon.

 

They’ve relied on information sent by amateur and professional weather watchers studying conditions, and sending up weather balloons, from hundreds of locations in surrounding countries and bodies of water. Armed with all this data — and one other factor, to be discussed in a moment — Krick confidently assures Eisenhower that conditions will be perfect at 6:30 a.m. Monday, June 5.

 

(No, that isn’t a typo. It’s the basis of this drama.) 

F1: High-octane entertainment

F1 (2025) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.13.25

This is, without question, the ne plus ultra of professional car racing movies.

 

Until now, depending upon one’s age, fans likely would point to 1966’s Grand Prix, 1971’s Le Mans, 2013’s Rush or 2019’s Ford V Ferrari.

 

Cocky young race car driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris, left) can't imagine why he
has been paired with — in his eyes — a washed-up senior citizen like Sonny Hayes
(Brad Pitt), and does nothing to conceal his contempt. The kid has much to learn...

(Sorry Tom, but 1990’s Days of Thunder sinks beneath its banal plot, stick-figure characters and jaw-droppingly dreadful dialogue.)

This one blows ’em all off the track.

 

Director Joseph Kosinski, co-scripter Ehren Kruger, cinematographer Claudio Miranda and editors Stephen Mirrione and Patrick J. Smith have done the seemingly impossible, by dropping their film right into the middle of actual Formula 1 racing competitions. The result is a level of unparallelled authenticity, which grants us edge-of-the-seat viewers an astonishing sense of being there: not merely on the track, in the design facilities and amid the pit crews, but also inside the cars during the heat of racing.

 

It's actually better than live-TV coverage of actual Formula 1 events, because Miranda employed state-of-the-art, pan-and-tilt portable cameras capable of providing multiple angles of drivers in the bay — essentially getting bolted into their vehicles, like the steering wheel and other components — and during the height of racing action on straightaways and G-force curves.

 

But all of this would be mere window-dressing, absent a solid story and relatable characters, played here by an impressively charismatic cast led by the always captivating Brad Pitt. Adept at strong dramatic scenes and graced with a quiet, laid-back calm that was made for a movie camera, Pitt also is blessed with one of cinema’s most radiant smiles. 

 

When it emerges — particularly during unexpected moments, as if Pitt were happily surprised by the appearance of an old friend — the emotional impact is to die for. He truly is the Baby Boomers’ Paul Newman.

 

Kosinski and Kruger essentially have revisited the formula that worked so well for them in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick: another take on the redemption saga of Old Dog Teaches Young Pup New Tricks, in a highly charged dramatic environment.

 

And, just as Kosinski put us into a fighter jet’s cockpit like never before, he has done the same here with Formula 1 racing.

The Banshees of Inisherin: Wails of discontent

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R for violence, brief graphic nudity and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.4.22

Back in 2008, writer/director Martin McDonagh teamed with actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for In Bruges, a darkly meditative — and frequently funny — study of loyalty and death between two contract killers (likely enjoyed only by viewers with broad-minded sensibilities).

 

Pádraic (Colin Farrell, right) makes another effort to determine precisely why he's being
shunned by former best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson), but the latter refuses to engage.

I’d love to say that McDonagh’s reunion with Farrell and Gleeson is equally appealing … but that’s far from the truth.

The time is 1923, the setting the harsh, rocky (and fictitious) island of Inisherin, off the west coast of Ireland. Pádraic Súilleabháin (Farrell), a hard-working milk farmer, lives with his sister Siobhán in a simple rustic house they often share with their pet miniature donkey, Jenny. Eight years have passed since their parents died; the sibling bond is tight and loving.

 

Every day at 2 p.m., presumably going back years, Pádraic has walked over to the house belonging to his best friend, Colm Doherty (Gleeson); the two then head over to the local pub: the island’s sole form of entertainment.

 

Except this time, as the story begins, Colm refuses to answer the door. Pádraic peers through a window, and sees Colm inside, silently brooding at a table. Pádraic knocks again; Colm doesn’t move.

 

Bewildered, Pádraic heads to the pub by himself; the publican, Jonjo (Pat Shortt), can’t believe his eyes. You’ve had a row, he suggests; Pádraic insists not.

 

“A’ least, I don’t tink so,” he admits.

 

Farrell’s expression, thus far, is puzzled and mildly hurt. Assuming that he somehow must be at fault, when Pádraic later corners Colm at a table — the latter also wants his daily pint — Pádraic does what all good friends do, and apologizes for whatever unintended slight may have occurred.

 

It’s a sincere apology. Farrell’s expression is earnest, his gaze both curious and worried.

 

Colm’s response is breathtakingly callous: “I just don’ like you any more.”

 

Blunt as that statement is, Colm’s subsequent explanation is even worse. Being older, he has begun to brood about his mortality, and the fact that — unless things change — he’ll leave nothing behind. He thus refuses to spend another minute with Pádraic — whose simple kindness is “too dull,” and who can spend hours ruminating about what emerges from Jenny’s rear end — in favor of focusing on his fiddle, and composing music that will outlive him. Like Mozart.

 

Farrell’s wide-eyed reaction prompts laughs, because — at first blush — this seems so ridiculous. To Pádraic, it’s like a parent suddenly disowning a child, for no reason. But when it becomes clear that Colm is serious, Pádraic begins a slow slide into deep sorrow. Farrell’s richly nuanced performance is heartbreaking: the palpable embodiment of unrelenting grief.

Dom Hemingway: For whom the belle tolls

Dom Hemingway (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for nudity, sexual content, violence, drug use and pervasive profanity
By Derrick Bang

We’ve recently been blessed with a couple of show-stopping soliloquies.

Fresh out of prison, Dom (Jude Law, left) cheerfully follows longtime friend and criminal
colleague Dickie (Richard E. Grant) on a trip to the South of France, where Dom fully
expects to be rewarded — very generously — for keeping his mouth shut during a
12-year stretch.

Matthew McConaughey’s coked-out stock-whisperer scene, as he describes the concept behind fugazi to a still-naïve Leonardo DiCaprio, is by far the best part of the otherwise bloated Wolf of Wall Street. It’s acting genius on McConaughey’s part; he’s positively electrifying.

The same can be said of Jude Law’s opening monologue in Dom Hemingway, as he waxes rhapsodic about the most cherished part of his male anatomy. It’s a jaw-dropping introduction to this film’s title character, with Law going on an on and on, never pausing for breath, in a single dynamite take for cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, who just lets the camera roll. Law builds to a ferocity that would have riveted 16th century, standing-room patrons at the Globe Theatre ... although, it must be admitted, the profanity present in this lust-laden oration would have scorched the earth for miles around.

Law builds to a furious, fulminating, saliva-laden climax — in more ways than one — and leaves us utterly breathless.

I’d love to say the rest of writer/director Richard Shepard’s film lives up to this prologue. Sadly, not the case.

Although he’d been busy for well over a decade earlier, Shepard came to everybody’s attention with 2005’s The Matador, a marvelously stylish crime noir comedy. Shepard’s cheeky script notwithstanding, that film got much of its juice from the way star Pierce Brosnan — normally regarded as refined, genteel and immaculately turned out — went down and dirty as a world-weary assassin for hire.

Brosnan’s scruffy stomp through a hotel lobby, clad only in his skivvies, may have been that year’s best single movie scene.

Shepard clearly tries for the same vibe with Dom Hemingway, but his unfocused script can’t settle on a particular mood. Although the narrative could be considered a journey toward redemption by a career criminal who regards himself as the world’s best safe-cracker, the tone shifts wildly from real-world tension and lethal danger, to family melodrama, and even the heightened fantasyland of magic realism.